


River Pebbles

by gooseberry



Series: The Kingdom [3]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, Motherhood, Pregnancy, Swimming, Thoughts of Infanticide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-10
Updated: 2013-03-10
Packaged: 2017-12-04 21:57:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/715543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseberry/pseuds/gooseberry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the Hobbit kink meme prompt: “Dís, Fíli & Kíli - swimming lessons. Doesn’t matter if the lads are kids, adolescents or adults - I just want their mum teaching them how to swim.”</p>
<p>It's a 'Dis and her boys' fic, exploring motherhood, pregnancy, and how you learn to love your children. WARNING: there are brief thoughts of infanticide.</p>
            </blockquote>





	River Pebbles

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place before 'we hide our brave face.'

When she is pregnant with her second child, she is cow-heavy. The baby rides low in her belly, much lower than Fili had, and by the seventh month, it feels as though she is carrying the weight of a mountain in the sling of her hips.

“A big belly means a strong baby,” the other women say. “And girls,” they say, “always ride low. Girls are cradled in the hips.” 

It’s small comfort when Dis feels as though she has become a prisoner in her own body, heavy and ungainly and unable to pick up her own child. (And oh, how Fili cries for her to pick him up. He’s so hurt by it, and she cannot make him understand why she won’t pick him up anymore.)

The baby seems to grow heavier by the day, and stronger. It kicks all night, until Dis rubs her hand over her belly. It turns, and it stretches, and it never seems to want to sleep. 

“My mother always said that girls fight the hardest in the womb,” her husband says when she is sitting on the edge of their bed, unable to sleep. He rubs her shoulders, an absent caress, before he leaves their house.

In the late morning, when the mountain has come alive, Dis takes Fili’s hand and leads him away from their house. She takes him out of the mountain, down the wide mountain path that runs alongside the river. The river gets caught in the foothills, twists back on itself, and in the bends of the river the current is slow and the water is shallow. She takes Fili there, where the water looks like a sheet of glass, and there she teaches Fili to swim.

The water is cold, even in the height of summer, and Fili throws a fit when she tries to coax him into the water. He stands on the bank, naked and angry, and stamps his feet when she backs into the river.

“You’ll like it,” she promises him, holding out her hands for him. “I’ll hold you the entire time, I won’t let go--”

“No!” he shouts, and his face, when it is scrunched up in anger, looks so much like his grandfather’s. He is such a beautiful child, fat and golden-haired, and she loves him for it, for his utter perfection.

“I promise,” she wheedles, and when he stamps his foot again, she crouches in the shallows of the river, flicking water at his feet. He scowls at her and she flicks water at his feet again, until he giggles.

She pulls him into the water, dragging him back with her into the middle of the river. He hangs onto her tightly, his fat little arms wrapped around her neck, and she murmurs, “Loosely, loosely, I won’t let go of you.”

They drift with the river’s slow current; Dis lets the river tug her along, and curls her toes around the rocks on the river floor, the algae and river weeds slimy under her feet. Fili refuses to let go of her, and so she carries him for hours, as they wander up and down the river, until Fili is shivering and Dis’s toes feel raw and bloodied. The baby is sleeping, though, lying quietly in the cradle of Dis’s hips, a weight for Dis’s balance. (It is, she thinks, enough--a great enough comfort for her, and for her children.)

x

The baby is a boy, and Dis swallows down her disappointment until it is resting, cold and hollow, in her belly. The baby is an ugly thing, long and thin and angry, and it screams for hours. It looks nothing like Fili, nor like any other dwarf infant that Dis has ever seen. She is--she is profoundly disappointed, and when she looks at Kili, she feels nothing but an aching emptiness.

“A changling, maybe,” Andvari says, but he is smiling when he says it. She thinks, sometimes, that he is the only one that loves Kili. She thinks, sometimes, that she will never be sure how to love Kili, not the way she loves Fili.

(She thinks, once, that she could kill him--that she could lay a pillow over his mouth and nose, or even her hand. She thinks of taking him down to the river, and of letting the current drag him away, to drown him or batter him on the rocks. She thinks of it, and then she kisses his forehead, where his hair is dark and fine and soft, and she swallows down her anger, and her disappointment, and her loss.)

“He’s difficult,” Dis confesses once. She is lying in bed, her arm tucked under her head, and she is watched Andvari. Andvari is pacing the floor, Kili tucked up against his neck, and Dis can still hear Kili’s sleepy whimpers. Kili has been fighting sleep all night, screaming whenever he is laid down, and no amount of nursing or rocking has been able to coax him to sleep. 

Andvari says nothing, but he looks at Dis, and Dis looks away from him.

“All Durins are difficult,” Andvari says after a while, when Dis is half-asleep. Andvari is still pacing the floor, and Kili is still whimpering. The sound of Kili’s whimpers make Dis’s breasts throb, heavy and full, and she struggles upwards, reaching out for her son.

x

Andvari leaves during the spring when Kili is three. He kisses the boys, holds them tighter than Dis has ever seen him do before, and then he presses a kiss to Dis’s mouth.

“A remarkable lady,” he calls her, and she is still laughing when he leaves the mountain. 

The house feels larger without Andvari there, and far more empty. Dis lets the boys sleep in her bed, and she does not think on whether it is for their sake, or for her own. Kili clings to her skirts, as though he thinks that she will leave him, too, and Fili holds onto Dis’s hand whenever she has a hand to spare. 

“I have a surprise,” she whispers to them one morning, when Andvari has been gone for nearly a week. She had dreamt of him during the night, and her bed seems empty and cold without him in it. She grabs her boys, kisses them with huge smacking sounds, and when they shriek with laughter, she says, “We’ll go on an adventure, the three of us together.”

She chases them into their room to dress them in old, faded play clothes, and she tickles Kili’s feet as she helps him put on his boots. When the boys are dressed, she fills heavy rolls of bread with meat and cheese, and they eat as they leave the mountain. They tramp up and down the mountainside together: Kili holds onto Dis’s hand, his fingers sticky and covered in crumbs from breakfast, and Fili runs back and forth on the paths, never quite out of Dis’s sight. 

The boys pick up sticks and rocks and pinecones, childish treasures, and Dis slips each one into her pockets, until her skirts are stretched awry. When the sun has risen to its highest point, Dis leads the boys down to the river, to the wide, cool stretches caught between the foothills. 

“Don’t get your boots wet!” she calls to Fili when Fili inches too close to the river. Dis strips Kili naked, kissing his elbows and his stomach (too thin, he’s far too thin, no matter how much she tries to feed him), and she folds his clothes, sets them up high on the bank where they won’t be splashed. She strips off her dress, folding it carefully so the boys’ twigs and pebbles won’t fall out of her pockets, and then she grabs Kili and throws herself, and Kili with her, into the river.

Kili gasps when they surface, and she kisses his red little face, and kisses him again when he laughs. “That’s my boy,” she praises him, and he looks so pleased with himself that she has to tickle his feet.

She sits in the shallows with the boys, and teaches them how to hold their breath and how to blow bubbles. When Kili loses interest, she sends him closer to the riverbank, where he begins collecting pebbles. Dis pulls Fili deeper into the water, until the water is up to Fili’s chest.

“Let go,” she tells him as she tucks an arm around his shoulders, turning him so his head is pressed against her shoulder. “Feet up, feet up--”

He’s an awkward floater, his limbs all askew and his bum hanging down in the water, but Dis is certain that all children are awkward--Frerin was even worse, she remembers, always thrashing and sinking in the water, until even Thorin had run out of patience. Dis pokes at Fili’s back and says, “No, stick out your belly, sweet--lots of air in your belly so you’ll float.”

Fili kicks when she tells him to, with far more energy than she had expected, and water goes everywhere. She hears Kili laugh from the riverbank, and Fili looks so very proud of himself, and Dis says, “Well done.”

x

They go to the river nearly every day, from the spring through the summer, and into the autumn. By the time the weather is beginning to change, Fili is a ferocious paddler. He swims across the river where the current is slowest, and Dis stands in the middle of the river, watching him. 

“Count,” Fili commands her, and she dutifully counts the seconds as Fili swims across the breadth of the river and back, his arms and legs throwing up water like a maelstrom in reverse. When Fili tires of racing himself across the river, he dives for things: Dis tosses heavy sticks into the deepest parts of the river, and she watches carefully as Fili searches for the sticks, diving beneath the water. As the summer passes, the sticks grow smaller and smaller, until Fili is searching the river bottom for a curiously shaped stick the size of Dis’s thumb.

Kili has less interest in the water--he spends hours wading through inch-deep water, digging shining pebbles out of the mud and sand of the river. The pile of pebbles at the house has outgrown Kili’s treasure box, but Kili can’t bear to throw any of his pebbles away, and Dis can’t bear to make Kili cry. 

“Ten pebbles,” she tells Kili each day, but when they leave, the pockets of her skirts are filled with dozens of pebbles, brown and green and blue, round and square and oblong, all of them worn smooth by the river’s flow. 

When Kili grows fussy, tired of digging for pebbles, Dis wades back to pick him up. He nestles against her sometimes, his arms thrown around her neck and his legs wrapped around her belly. Other times he sits on her shoulders, his hands fisted in her braids; she holds onto his feet, her fingers wrapped around his thin little ankles, and she bends her knees, slowly sinking deeper into the water as he screams in excited terror.

“I’m sinking,” she burbles, her mouth half under the water. “Kili, help me, I’m sinking--”

He shrieks and tugs at her hair, saying, “Stand up, stand _up_!” until she does so.

And other times, she floats on her back, and she lets Kili lie on her belly, like an otter and its pup. She closes her eyes, the heat of the sun turning her lazy, and she tells Kili, “You’ll need to learn how to swim, love.”

This year, though, there is no need--Kili is still so very small, and it is easy to tuck him up against her body, to carry him through the water. This year, it is enough to grab Fili’s feet, to lift him high and to throw him into the depths of the water as he laughs and shouts. It is enough to watch Fili swim and splash, and to admire Kili’s dozens of pebbles.

When the sun begins to sink, they dress in their clothes, and they tramp their way back up the hills, to their mountain. Her boys hold her hands, their fingers cold and wrinkled from the water, and she thinks that they are beautiful like this, sunburnt and dirty, their hair tangled and wet. She swings their hands as Fili chatters on about the river and Kili sucks his thumb, and she feels love roar through her, like the river after the winter thaw: a monstrous thing, with the strength to tear down the mountains. 

“Tomorrow,” she tells them, and her skirts are muddy and her pockets are filled with Kili’s pebbles, “we’ll go on another adventure.”


End file.
